I'll post this last thing and then I'll quit
http://startribune.com/stories/506/4178802.html
Dan Barreiro: Wild, Gaborik both at fault in contract squabble
Dan Barreiro,?Star Tribune
Published October 28, 2003
DANB28
Reunited, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel played at the Xcel Energy Center on Sunday and Monday nights as part of their Old Friends Tour.
It took the better part of 20 years for the anger to recede, the egos to be soothed and the terms to be negotiated.
That might be a walk in Central Park compared to getting the Wild and Marian Gaborik back together in the very same arena.
Hello darkness, my old friend.
Yes, if you're a dedicated puckhead, things are getting mighty dim in the State of Hockey.
On the ice, the Wild is starting to look like just another faceless, and slightly hapless, expansion team. Off the ice, the Wild suddenly has the baggage of an aging franchise forced to deal with major, contract-related acrimony.
On Monday, Gaborik, through one of his agents, issued a statement that appears to mean that yet another serious stalemate has been reached. Does that mean the Wild will be Gabby-less for the rest of the season?
In the "Yesterday I was lying, today I'm telling the truth" world of sports executives, agents and players, you learn to rule out no possibility; yesterday's negotiating mountain can magically turn into a molehill overnight.
But this mountain looks fairly immovable.
The Wild clearly is dug in. Once General Manager Doug Risebrough went public with the team's latest offer, it became obvious that the Wild was not going to budge in any significant way.
The Gaborik side is looking for brownie points for dropping its contract demand from $6.5 million a season to $4.5 million in just a couple of weeks.
Some people might say: "Wow. A $2 million drop. This is a significant sign of goodwill by the Gaborik camp."
Moved by this gesture? About as moved as if a snake-oil salesman came to my door.
All this "gesture" points out is just how ludicrous the $6.5 million figure was in the first place. You pick a number that high, and of course $4.5 million is suddenly going to sound reasonable.
In his statement, Gaborik says, "I offered to sign a contract for the same gross pay I earned in each of the last two seasons." Agent David Schatia continues to say the Wild, in offering $9.5 million over three seasons, is asking Gaborik to make less than he made last season.
This is as misleading as it is disingenuous. Guaranteed money is important to players. Many of them will tell you it is everything to them.
A year ago, Gaborik was guaranteed $1.075 million. Over three years, the Wild is offering a guaranteed $9.5 million, including $3 million for next season.
That's almost a $2 million increase in guaranteed money over last season, even if Gaborik falls on his face and scores seven goals, and the Wild misses the playoffs.
Last season, Gaborik made another $3.4 million in incentive bonuses.
So, what he is really saying is that the Wild will not guarantee him what he made through salary and incentives last season. The Gaborik camp has decided that this must be the starting point for negotiations. Of course, you will never quite hear anybody from the Gaborik camp put it this way because it doesn't make management sound quite as evil.
The Wild's hands are not clean, either. In the new proposed deal, the incentives are so absurd that, with this team's offense, there is a good chance Gaborik would not be able to attain the numbers to make a serious jump, even if he instantly turned into a blend of Wayne Gretzky, Gordie Howe and Stan Mikita.
The incentives have gone from being very makeable to quite laughable. At the end of the negotiations with Pascal Dupuis, the holdout blinked. The Wild stood firm, merely shifting $100,000 from one year to another. But given how much more significant Gaborik is to the Wild's future, the organization loses by playing the same game of hardball.
Whoever you want to pit as the villain here, the whole thing should stick in your craw. Or maybe it shouldn't at all. Maybe that's the problem here.
The best advice might be to stop letting both sides believe you're hanging on every twist and turn in the negotiations.
Nothing gets older quicker than management and agent spin-doctoring their way through a contract impasse. Yet every word gets reported as if the fate of Western civilization hangs in the balance.
That's why these folks take themselves so seriously in the first place. That's why they can make a production of announcing, a day or two in advance, that important e-mail updates could be coming.
Maybe the answer is to ignore them all, until there is a real resolution that either reunites Gaborik with the Wild, or makes their divorce more permanent than Simon's with Garfunkel.